March 24th, 2008

Seeing poetry being performed live by actual poets was a great experience. It was awesome seeing how they stressed certain words and phrases and how they overall put emotion on the poem. It was like listening to a piece of music being performed by the writer in front of you. They know when to put emphasis and stress certain words that make them stand out and stick to the audience (even if some of it seemed a bit silly). I thought most of the poetry was successful in giving off the emotions that they were shooting for. Some of the poems seemed to be more on the humorous side, so I took them a little less seriously, but they still had their own message and still were at least slightly convincing in their cause.The role of poetry is many things. From what I got from listening to the poets in D.C., I would guess that role of poetry for them is the voice of the author, the voice of a generation, the “voice of the voiceless”, and maybe even a spark to start of the fire of revolution, but there are many more categories that poems fall into.The poets seemed to be convincing with their work by the way they portrayed it: they were full of passion and very confident when in front of the audience. I felt that the only person that might have not been (fully) convincing was Alix Olson. She seemed to tell some of her poems as if it was a stand-up comedy routine. She still got her point across, but those acts could’ve been done in a comedy club instead. My favorite poet who performed would have to be Sonia Sanchez. It might have just been the environment, but I felt that she had a very personal message to everyone there; and from the reactions of the audience, her message was well received and had an impact on them. I greatly liked that (for all the poets), the way the audience reacted to each poem differently. That is something you only get when you see a poetry performance live.